


Won't you make fun into something necessary

by caught_your_phancy



Series: Charlotte sometimes [2]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Cooking, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, M/M, Pre-Canon, Slice of Life, Very Minor Work-related Angst, Zoo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:02:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24409252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caught_your_phancy/pseuds/caught_your_phancy
Summary: Kevin's niece stays over. They take her to the zoo.
Relationships: Kevin Cozner/Ray Holt
Series: Charlotte sometimes [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1665205
Comments: 6
Kudos: 29





	Won't you make fun into something necessary

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Hooverphonic's _Dictionary_.
> 
> In case you spot any errors (grammatical or otherwise), please let me know in the comments. English is not my first language.
> 
> Enjoy!

When the bell rang, Kevin already had two neat piles of julienned onions and carrots sitting on the cutting board, patiently waiting their turn to be sweated. He gave his hands a quick rinse, before heading toward the front door and unlocking it. On the front porch stood Christine, her daughter’s hand clasped in hers. The little girl was clutching the handle of a miniature, leaf green suitcase and smiling radiantly from ear to ear. 

“Uncle Kevin!”

“Hello there, Charlotte. It's good to see you again,” said Kevin, feeling the corners of his mouth twitch up to repay her her bright smile in kind; his niece’s enthusiasm was irresistibly infectious. 

When he turned to Christine, however, the instinctive smile slipped from his face. It would seem that it was worse than he had thought: there were dark crescent-shaped bruises underneath his sister-in-law’s eyes, and her usually impeccable hairdo had been replaced by a haphazard bun. He could see that her nail polish was chipped, leaving her nails bare and brittle in patches. There was a travel bag behind her. 

“Charlotte,” he said, careful to keep his expression neutral but not managing to mask the slight tremor in his voice; a crack running down the middle of a failing dam. “Would you go put your suitcase in the living room, please.”

Christine watched her daughter retreat into the house, shifting a little from foot to foot. “Thank you so much for taking her on such short notice, Kevin.”

“Of course,” Kevin replied, tentatively reaching out to rest a hand on her bony shoulder, “Tell me that you at least have time for a cup of coffee?” 

She rubbed her eyes, and shook her head. "I reckon Martin will come get her on Sunday, in time for church."

Fully expecting her to brush him off (it had happened before), Kevin said: "You know you shouldn't let them tire you out like this. They’ll end up running you into the ground,” then, softer, and allowing some more of his concern to bleed through, “We worry, you know."

To his surprise, Christine actually looked marginally grateful, for once. She took a step forward and drew him into a hug. Kevin got a whiff of her familiar perfume. (Hermès, _Eau des merveilles_. Martin had got it for her as a Christmas present, a couple of years back.) He could feel her ribs through the fabric of her top, closer to the surface than he would like. "It's alright, Kevin, thank you. I'm handling it, promise. I'll catch up on some sleep during the flight."

She stepped back, hauling the bag over her shoulder: "Now have fun with my daughter over the weekend, you hear? She has been begging me to come visit again every day since last time." 

"I’m certain that we will. Have a safe flight, yourself." Kevin wished her, mentally damning her aptitude for deviating every conversation away from all things her job. If Martin wasn’t going to, Kevin would have to sit her down again sometime, he thought.

He called into the hall: "Charlotte, please come say goodbye to your mother!" At this, there was the pattering of small, socked feet on the parqueted floors. Charlotte fluttered over to them, pigtails bouncing, and Christine knelt down to give her a solid hug. "Bye mommy," Charlotte chirruped. 

"Bye-bye Charlie, you have fun with your uncles, now. I'll see you on Sunday." 

She was gone then, hurrying toward her car, and the pair of them waved her out from the porch until the sleek BMW disappeared behind the corner of the street. 

"Let's go back inside," Kevin said after, placing a hand on Charlotte’s shoulder and navigating her toward the kitchen. 

"Now, I still need to get the eggplant diced, and the tomatoes cut into slices. Would you help me?" he asked.

Charlotte nodded enthusiastically, and with as much grace as a four-year-old could reasonably muster, she walked over to the hook that had her polka-dotted apron hanging from it. (When she had started coming over more regularly, Raymond had fixed it low on the wall, so that it was within her reach). Kevin dug around in the kitchen drawer to find their kid-friendly knife, and handed it to her, before bending down to tie her apron behind her back with a simple bow knot. "Well," he smiled, adopting a passable attempt at a French drawl that was guaranteed to make her laugh, "Sous-chef _Charlotte_ , let us get to work, _d’accord_?" 

She giggled. Once he had found her the step stool, she picked up the first of two eggplants and got started painstakingly cutting it into small cubes, chattering all the way. Meanwhile, Kevin sliced the tomatoes, allowing the room to be filled with the sound of the sputtering oil in the skillet and tangential playground gossip. Soon, the kitchen was awash with the rich scents of cooking and frying vegetables, of oregano and bay leaves. The warm glow of late-afternoon yellow shone through the bay windows while they worked, coating everything in shades of orange blossom honey and smoothing out every corner, every sharp angle.

Kevin had just finished salting the boiling pasta water when Raymond walked into the kitchen to set the table, as per usual. He had been in the study, looking over the extra case paperwork he'd been assigned. Kevin had tried to convince himself that this wasn’t another instance of his partner’s superiors taking advantage of him, but to no avail. This sort of thing happened far too frequently for it to be arbitrary. Where Raymond’s work was concerned, Kevin had soon learned to see the worst in every man (and—occasionally—woman) employed by the NYPD.

"Charlotte," Raymond exclaimed, the frown in between his eyebrows impeccably smoothed out when he smiled, "How are you?" 

This prompted another story from the little girl, complete with loads of gesturing and pulling of faces. Ray patiently waited for her to finish, listening all the while and asking short, dichotomous questions whenever she paused to pick the tread of the story back up. "I take it that means 'well'," he then concluded, handing Charlotte the cutlery, whilst expertly balancing three plates and glasses on his left arm himself. 

They had vegetable spaghetti bolognese, and when Charlotte asked for seconds, eyeing the pasta bowl eagerly, Kevin reminded himself to add a sticker to the new recipe. (The stickers indicated that a dish had been ‘Charlotte-approved’. Kevin was beginning to amass quite the collection.)

After dessert (the pastéis de nata Kevin had made earlier, with Charlotte’s coming in mind), they let her pick a board game for them to play. She chose a primarily memory-based one, which was bad news for the both of them and their two-and-a-half-decades-older brains. Once they were a couple of rounds in, Kevin hazarded a look at his watch. 19:45. They better get her into her pajamas.

Charlotte won the last round, to really no-one's surprise and to her unfettered delight. Raymond showed her how to arrange the game pieces in their box, then picked the little girl up and settled her on his hip to carry her up the stairs. Kevin took her suitcase, and trailed behind them, watching as Charlotte rested her head on Ray's shoulder. That image never did get old, he thought fondly.

After Ray had given her a quick bath, Charlotte came back into the guest room smelling like lavender and minty toothpaste. Settling on the crisp new linen Kevin had put on the bed, she leaned into his side, warm and sleepy-soft already, with her stuffed rhinoceros resting loosely in the curve of her elbow. The story Kevin ended up reading for her had something to do with anthropomorphic animals; he knew she was fond of those. Charlotte fell asleep halfway through, breath fanning against his chest and he extracted himself as carefully as he could to tuck her in. He left the door ajar behind him.

On the other side of the window, the sky had darkened to a deep blue hue. Farther away, an owl hooted, and Kevin descended the stairs, humming as he went. 

-

The next morning dawned sunny and pleasantly warm. Lucky for them, seeing as that day they were taking Charlotte to the zoological garden for the first time. 

After breakfast, they made their way to the bus stop. The sun shone brightly overhead, and Charlotte skipped down the pavement, stopping only twice: once to ruffle the baker's dog's fur, once because there was a pretty stone she wanted to examine further. It turned out to be a beer bottle cap, and Kevin found himself promising to safekeep it for her. (Guard it with his life even, if necessary, and he could only guess as to where she was picking up these kinds of expressions. It might have had something to do with _popular culture_.)

For the duration of the bus ride, Charlotte was pointing things out left and right. Just as Kevin had finished explaining to her as best he could the logistics of cattle-keeping culture in the city center (They had seen a man cross the street with two cows in tow. Having spent a fair portion of his life in New York City, Kevin didn’t even bother with double takes anymore), they got to their stop.

After purchasing their tickets, they were in. For a Saturday morning, it was surprisingly uncrowded, which Raymond remarked on whilst they were headed toward the sea lion enclosure. Kevin theorized it might have something to do with the rising popularity of the internet. Raymond rather agreed. Charlotte meanwhile, in front of them, was alternating between singing a made-up ostinato with consisted solely of the words “sea lion” and looking back to check if they were keeping up.

Over the course of the morning, they saw a number of animals, most of them mammals, and most of them earning themselves the title of “Charlotte’s very favorite animal” at least once before they strolled over to the next enclosure. 

At the petting zoo, Charlotte got to feed a goat, who bleated at her, loudly, complete with tail flopping and stamping hooves, causing the dusty dirt to whirl up and up. Bewildered, she stared at the animal for a second, before bleating right back. It drew a laugh out of Raymond, and Kevin snapped a picture that would look great on the mantle. (His partner laughing with his eyes as well as his mouth on the right, and a proud-looking, redheaded little girl feeding a handful of hay to the three goats who had flocked together around her, on the left.) 

When lunchtime came, they had the caprese sandwiches Kevin had prepared in the morning. They ate them by the duck pond, their impermeable picnic blanket a barrier between their pants and the marshy grass of the field. The crowd had started to thicken by midday, and all around them was the cheery chatter of children and toddlers, talking their heads off and clamoring for their parents’ or siblings’ attention.

Charlotte, half-eaten sandwich in hand, had ambled off a little, though she hadn’t strayed from their line of sight. She crouched down next to a small boy in denim overalls, who was busy poking at the mud of the bank with a stick.

“Those clothes are going to end up dirty,” Ray said conversationally, no doubt referring to the way Charlotte had now sunk down into the grass on her knees. The edges of her ultramarine dress would unequivocally soak up the muddy water all around her.

Kevin smiled at him, feeling sun-drunk and sated. “Oh, undoubtedly,” he said, popping a cherry tomato in his mouth. It was very difficult to care about what seemed like a trifle when they had packed extra clothing in the trunk of the car for this very reason.

Ray hummed thoughtfully, still chewing on his sandwich at a speed that was fast enough to be efficient but not so fast as to make him unable to appreciate every single bite. He loved Kevin’s cooking, even when that cooking only consisted of throwing some crudités and cheese on a baguette and deeming it worthy of lunch.

They could hear Charlotte’s occasional giggle from where they were seated, and watched as she bumped her shoulder against the boy’s, chatting and gesticulating theatrically. Meanwhile, he and Ray discussed the progress Kevin was making on a paper of his regarding misogyny in the Iliad, and Ray had him enthralled for nigh-on a quarter of an hour with a lecture on the different varieties of orchids (there had been a particularly fine specimen in an enclosure earlier). When the hands of Kevin’s watch indicated half-past two, the postdoc called out to his niece: “Charlotte, we’re leaving!”

“Coming!” she hollered in response, before bidding her new-found friend goodbye and jumping up to dart toward them, skidding in the dirt. When she screeched to a halt in front of them, Kevin caught a spark of realization in her eyes. 

She looked down sheepishly to see her muddy knees and her legs, her sodden dress dotted with green smudges made by the imprint of the grass. "Sorry," she said, looking back up at Kevin.

"It's alright," Kevin said reassuringly, handing her a handkerchief so she could towel of most of the dirt, "It will all be dry again in no time.”

(Especially with the sun shining down at them as it was; he could already _feel_ the freckles sprouting on his forearms and the bridge of his nose. He had never really liked them, the spots, but when they had first started dating Ray had called them _charming_ and then he hadn’t minded them quite so much anymore.) 

In the afternoon, they visited the aviary, and saw the coyotes and emus. Afterward, at a near-optimal time before Charlotte’s estimated bedtime, they stopped for ice cream. (Kevin got passion fruit, Ray vanilla and Charlotte pistachio with rainbow sprinkles. For some reason, the ice-cream vendor had no trouble knowing which was for whom.) As the afternoon was slowly coming to an end, Charlotte began to drag her feet, and they had to slow down a number of times waiting for her to catch up. Finally, Ray lifted her up over his head, and deposited her on his shoulders. Delighted, she clapped, after which she rested her hands and forearms on his head, and did so for the remainder of the walk.

The sun was already disappearing behind the horizon by the time they caught the bus that went into the suburbs. Charlotte had deserted her own seat to go sit on Kevin’s lap and was now resting the back of her head on his chest, while one of his arms was wrapped snugly around her, preventing her from falling over if the bus turned a corner or the driver stood on the brakes.

She was quiet, subdued (most probably exhausted from the excitement of the day), and looked out of the window without peppering Kevin with questions like she'd done in the morning. Kevin raked a gentle hand through one of her pigtails absentmindedly, mentally cataloging what was left to be done when they got home. (Luckily, he had already done most of the cooking for dinner in the morning, so there wasn’t much on the list).

From the opposite seat Ray was radiating contentedness. Whenever their eyes met, the gentle lines at the corner of Ray’s deepened and his lips curled up in a tender smile. Kevin’s ridiculous heart still couldn’t help but skip a beat every time this happened. Their love, if anything, had not soured (like his parents had warned him it would before things between them has gone irreversibly awry) so much as it had ripened and blossomed, matured into something that had begun to taste like forever.

Once they had nearly made it to their stop, Kevin let Charlotte push the bright red stop button and the bus soon slowed to a halt, brakes hissing and screeching. They walked home and Kevin could feel the cool breeze do wonders on his still —somehow— sunburnt skin. (He’d rubbed SPF 50 sunscreen on both himself and Charlotte at various times during the day, and had at one point walked around with a smear of it on his nose for a while, because Ray and Charlotte had conspired against him to not draw his attention to it. They had found it humorous. Ray had even snapped a picture of Kevin walking around with a chalk-white nose, blissfully ignorant of his predicament.)

At home, Ray and Charlotte took it upon themselves again to set the table, while Kevin got out the tabbouleh and the hummus, and warmed up the pita bread. He noticed Ray had poured them some wine too. (He hadn’t even told him he had been feeling like having some with the meal. Honestly, that man.) With that, they took their seats and ate in companionable, comfortable silence that was occasionally broken by Charlotte, the scraping of a knife on a plate, or the humming of the freezer behind them.

When the plates had been cleared and Ray had taken Charlotte upstairs for a bath, Kevin sat down at the empty kitchen table. Swirling around what was left of the wine in his glass, he stared out the window into their garden, with its neatly trimmed stretches of grass and the garden lights that stuck out like miniature lighthouses amidst a sea of the flowers Kevin had enjoyed planting last year, during springtime.

He shouldn’t forget to turn them off, he thought vaguely, head spinning more from the exhaustion that had hit him hard after sitting down and the (minor) sunburn, than from the wine. He continued to feel quietly happy as he heard Charlotte giggle in the hallway upstairs, Ray’s much lower chuckling following suit. 

“Kevin, dear,” Ray called then, “Charlotte says she is ready for a bedtime story now that she is all—(there was a pause) all _squeaky clean_.”

Kevin laughed at the incredulity with which the undoubtedly quoted words were pronounced.

“I’m coming,” he answered, flicking out the outside lights that had winked to life earlier on his way up. 

Outside, the garden got shrouded in darkness and the shrubbery, the flowers, the grass veiled by inky blue and not-quite-black. Inside, Kevin Cozner, PhD, joined the two people he loved most in the world to draw a memorable day to a close.


End file.
